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My DotComThe True Story ... |
I can well imagine you are. The Silly Software Company, My DotCom, all that stuff that pretends to be scientific or philosophical, but not really ... Even the disclaimer is a bit strange.
Well then, here it is, the true story behind these virtual companies, and the stuff they publish on the web.
It all started when I got hold of a couple of old computers. I got a free internet account soon after that, and began to wonder how websites were made. And I figured that the best way to find out, would be to try and build a web site myself. But to create a web site, I needed content (yes, one does need content to create a web site !), so I wrote a few texts, found out how hyperlinks work, and saw that it was good. Or at least, it was fun.
While playing with these old computers, running Microsoft Windows 95/98 with Internet Explorer was kinda slow (Linux I hadn't heard of back then), so I experimented with different browsers. I also messed up my system more than once, so I'd have to format c:\ and start all over again. As a result, I kept loosing al my 'Favorites' (Bookmarks, Hotlist, whatever its called in any browser). Yes, I should have made backups.
There had to be a better way. There was :
All these web sites that I wanted to be able to find again, they're on the Web. And to visit them, I had to go online anyway. As I knew a thing or two about html by then, I figured that I might as well put all the URL's in a html page and use that as bookmarks. No need for backups : Whatever my browser of choice or no matter how many times I change browser or wipe my hard disk, my 'favorites' are safely on some internet provider's server. And they'd be accessible from anywhere, with any computer with a browser and an internet connection. This small set of links to maps and route planners is all that remains from it today.
Apparently it is a clever idea to put your favorites / bookmarks online. A Dutch firm adopted the idea and - with typical dutch enterpreneural instinct - commercialized it : zurf - "put your bookmarks / favorites on a (private, secured) web site so you can easily use them from any computer, anywhere in the world". www.zurf.nl.
Later, Delicious.com and others did something similar.
I could have been rich by now ... Oh well :-)
One of my hobbies is (or was) writing. An other one is (or rather : was) hanging out at the local pub, and waste hours discussing whatever comes to mind. I found that I rather enjoyed arguing unusual points of view, and to create a somewhat logical, rational, coherent explanation about an reel or imaginary correlatopn between any number of seemingly unrelated facts.
Then I heard a joke about a "denkologist" and I decided that there would be a scientific / philosophical discipline called 'denkologie' - which would translate into 'rationology" in English, and - as I still needed some more content, I created some "denkologist" essays, hoping I'd be the first tho use the word denkologie on the World Wide Web - and get my own 15 minutes of fame. (Unfortunately, a German newspaper beat me to it).
The concept of writing 'rationalogical' articles actually started earlier, when I was working for VIA - Vrijwillige Internationale Aktie (the Flemisch branch of SCI- Service Civil International, a non-profit association for international voluntary work). Every few months, they'd publish a newsletter for their members, so they occasionally needed articles. I took to writing something every now and then, and recycled some of my writings to add content to my web site.
At that time, the Citroen 2CV was my favorite car. As a matter of fact, I'm still quite fond of them. I also wanted to know about putting pictures on a web site, so I felt I needed kind of an umbrella organisation that would publish both the denkologie essays and pictures of 2CV's : Useless Publications Unlimited was born.
Meanwhile, as I submitted all these pages to search engines, they were beginning to get picked up, and much to my surprise, I found that, at some point, my 'denkologie' essays found their way in to all sorts of collections of philisophocal texts online. Not too bad for something that is, in essence, a readers digest of endless hours spend in the local pub. 15 minutes of fame, yeah!
So, Useless Publications Unlimited was conceived as the kind of publishing company that would publish just about anything. A perfect umbrella for the denkologie essays, the 2CV pictures, and so on. I can also imagine they'd also publish a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, a user's manual to life, or a scientific article about the lenght of a piece of string theory.
Talking about science, that happens to be one of my other main interests, so Useless Publications also got to carry the Science in Action series : more factual, more explicitely true, but with a certain twist. Like, it's mathematically true that Russian roulette has better adds than poker or roulette, but that does not make it a good idea, does it ? Somehow, I enjoy looking at high school science and mathematics from a bit a shrewed angle, and every now and then I'd write something down. It also shows that science can be fun(ny), and that it really relates to real life and has bearing on 'cool' stuff such as driving or racing.
I spend quite some time driving and often get in traffic jams on my way to work. Thinking up things like that is an interesting way of passing time ...
Later I found that sites with a certain ressemblance to parts of Useless Publication. The Straight Dope.
Somewhere along the line, I wanted to learn how to program. But - still a Windows user - the only programming languages I could get my hands on were Qbasic and the DOS batch language. I wrote a few things, then thought maybe I'd 'publish' them on the web. So I created The Silly Software Company. The Silly Software Company was my first company that, in my eyes, really could be seen as a dotcom : it doen't exist, exept on the web, and it produces software nobody really needs. After all, the Silly Software Productions were just experiments and exercices with Qbasic and MS-DOS batch files.
After a while, I found that trial and error was not so effective anymore as a study method, and I decided to take evening classes in Information Technology. That was quite interesting. And things were beginning to come together. One of the classes I took was about web authoring, so I learned to write good html and a bit of xhtml. As an exercice, we had to create a web site of a couple of pages, some framed, some not, with style in cascading style sheets and/or header style or inline style. The subject was to be our own curriculum vitae, with 1 additional page about meta tags.
While going to school, I started collecting links to interesting, IT-related web sites again. The concept of having them on a web (as in KICKS, KISS, etc.) page began to make sense again. Borrowing the style of my online CV, I organised these links in a couple of web pages, and called the result The Hacker Library, or How to become a hacker in 2743 easy lessons, after Eric S. Rayond's Hacker Howto.
Every once in a while, teachers in school would have us make a study of a certain topic, and write about it or do a presentation in class. As I found it more motivating to write for an audience, even an imaginary one, than just fill pages that would only be read to be graded by the teacher, I took to converting those school tasks into web pages, and added them to the Hacker Library. That started my own little collection of How To's.
I also found that writing is, for me, a good way to get my thoughts organised, study a subject, see how things relate, and have something you can use for future reference, so occasionally I started writing how to's and articles about things I had been experimenting with. All that added content to my web site, so it began to score quite good in search engines. And having information readily online is also an effective way of having that information available on any location that has a computer and an internet connection. That's the librarian in me, again : list and catalogue information so that it can be found again when I need it.
The programming classes bread new life into The Silly Software Company. Suddenly I had quite a few exercises in Visual Basic and C++ that could be added to the Silly Software Company's catalogue.
Up 'till then, I had free dail-in internet accounts with a numver of Internet Access Providers, all of whom offered some megabytes of web space that I gladly used as home for each of these web sites. When I finally upgraded to a permanent broadband internet connection, I wanted to put all these pages on the same server, so I would not have to use a modem connection to maintain the pages at their home with the free internet accounts. But, at the same time, I did not want to give up 'my' dotcoms - I like Useless Publications and Silly Software -, while on the other hand I had 4 or 5 websites and I did not see how one of them could be the umbrella for the 3 or 4 others.
As I was already thinking of these web sites as dotcoms, the solution was simple : their website would be hosted by a company that offered web hosting to virtual companies, to dotcoms. And of course it could not be named anything else but My DotCom.
So, there you have it, the true story behind MyDotcom and the web sites it hosts. It's a bit like explaining a joke. The main reason for writing this page was : I felt I needed at least 1 serious page, 1 page that put everything in its context, for those readers that want to 'check out my web site' and are then confronted with this heap of nonsense about dinosaurs, viruses, hacking and cracking, almost serious programming or the reason why kitchen cabinets never really fit. I hope it won't spoil your fun.
